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Working with a new CMS this week that a company has no doubt just paid a fortune for... and it's a nightmare. Built for anyone but the users, despite supposedly being bang up to date.
So, go on, what are the worst packages/platforms you've used?
windows.
HP Openview stuff. NNMi/DDMi/Service Centre
Windoze.
Lotus Notes...the worst by far.
Endnote used to be really bad (bibliography software popular in the sciences). It seems ok now but it's basically turd-polishing as their fundamental design for managing references just isn't that usable.
SAP
+1 for endnote
hours of my life wasted...
iTunes, no question.
Microsoft Word. It never fails to infuriate me.
EDIT: I just saw someone mentioned iTunes - this is on par with Word for being infuriating!
Norton antivirus and itunes, both invasive ****ing evil bits of software.
Avast anti-virus. Complete resoruce hog and kept killing the computer.
+1 for Lotus Notes
Also, a very obscure package called HECSALV or POSSE, depending on where you are using it, it is absolute sh!te!
Lotus Notes, definitely. The email program is the least intuitive one I have used since PINE.
+1 SAP - who put together this dross?
Novel.
Word - keeps auto formatting stuff, MS Front page is a bit annoying, MS Project, no idea how that's supposed to work.
ANything written without serious amounts of user input (which is unfortunately rather a lot of software).
System Architect - brings out the worst in my proletarian roots and language
itunes? really?
I've a cousin, she's 8, she manages just fine. 🙄
+lots SAP. So bad you can't really believe they were serious. The fact that it is hugely successful and used by most large companies says...what?
iTunes by a country mile
Sounds like a pattern forming!
For me it's SAP in a work environment and at home it's itunes and I normally end up having to sort everyones phones out on it!
Itunes.
Itunes put me off buying anything Apple related, even though daughter and wife have iPods of many different sizes. Hate it with a passion.
Ellipse, a maintenance management database/tool, truly clunky shite, not helped by the complete idiots that try and manage the beast that it has become. It has truly become the tail that wags the dog in my industry.
ohh and it struggles to run on windows so how it's supposed to work on an iPad/phone as an App I don't know.
The new cms isn't Alterian is it? If so i feel your pain!
Lotus Notes - why does clicking on them make buttons depress, but nothing happen? Honourable mentions to iTunes, MS Project and especially SAP.
Close between Lotus Notes and itunes.
+whatever for iTunes.
If it's really designed for the consumer Market, why make it so f---ing difficult to use. Utterly non-intuitive.
My work is about to bring in SAP. Never used it. Is it really that bad?
Lotus notes
Siebel
Excel 2010
Deffo iTunes...Hideous bit of kit!
+1 for hp openview nnm. You are just left with the impression you should be able to do so much more with it.
+1 for lostus notes, just awful.
itunes is excelent
Lotus notes
closely followed by
iTunes*
* with relation to iOS devices. It's fine apart from that.
edit: oh and iPM
itunes. I loath it with a passion. OSX is great, but whoever created itunes should be poked with a pointy stick. In the eye.
Anything by Microsoft, utter shite.
SAP is fine if implemented well. The problem is most places can't get around how integrated it is and therefore complicated it is to spec, design and implement.
e1
An education MIS which is breathtakingly dire. Absolutely not fit-for-purpose; unreliable; unstable; unusable for many of its stated purposes like tracking and reporting; UI designed by chimps; labyrinthine, inflexible folder structure; data-integrity issues galore, horrendous data-duplication....
Oh, I could go on and frequently do.
It has truly become the tail that wags the dog in my industry.
+1
Anything BT decides to install on their engineers' laptops. Most stuff is buggy or bogs down the out-of-date laptops, they can't even sort out simple things like making the cursor tab along boxes in the correct order, so you end up tabbing and then alt-tabbing back to the bits it decides to skip.
Anything that is really rubbish, they develop work-arounds that involve resetting various things and restarting the laptop, as those that created the offending software have moved on to another project.
My new laptop...to open a particular website via a link in a program, you have to open IE first, otherwise the program and IE grind to a crawl, then when you try and save the files contained on the website, you are unable to choose a location to save them. Plus I have to reset IE's advanced settings twice a day as when I try and sign in to the corporate website, it opens three windows and an error. Apparently its a known issue with no fix...
iTunes
Can't believe I'm the first to mention MS Access. Biggst pile of shiite ever (and I'm a certified advanced user...)
Oh, and iTunes obviously
SIMs
Most of the software I write!
Haven't used Lotus Notes for years but it is pretty shocking. But my final vote has to be for iTunes. It amazes me how apple manage to write such lovely looking UIs and then churn out that turgid heap of tripe.
We use Lotus Notes as e-mail at work and it's great. No problems at all.
My pet hate is web pages where the designers have tried to pack in as many fancy gimmicks as possible, completely slowing the page down and adding nothing to the usefullness.
How itunes? I use it literally 24/7, and for various things, and never have any problems with it.
Adobe reader as it needs updating every hour.
LaTeX. Just irritating cause of stupid errors.
Internet Explorer. For obvious reasons.
Outlook Express. Just irritating compared to browser based email.
Pretty happy with windows 7 at the moment, XP was reliable too. Vista was terrible, but I never had to use it daily so I'm quite a fan of windows.
VLC is lovely. So is Firefox. Matlab is quite nice too. Autograph is perfect in every way. Most of microsoft office works very well. Various versions of Photoshop are pretty cool too.
Lotus Notes for me. After years of using it for e-mail, Outlook was a huge relief (really).
spooky_b329 - waves hello to fellow BT person.
I'd go with iTunes as well.
It's not that it isn't easy to use, it's just that what it does, it does in a VERY messy way.
Siebel hurts me physically hurts me.
Beenusing office 2010 patiently for a few months now trekking myself the ui will be better and I just need to get used to it. Truth is office 2003 was great now they have broken it.
Can't abide iTunes myself either. I think it's probably ok if you let it take over your media library and / or run it on a Mac, neither of which I'm prepared to do. So I just end up fighting it all the time, which on balance I still think is the lesser of two evils.
I think though, the worst commercial software I've ever had the misfortune to come across was the old AOL dial-up software. Evil, invasive stuff.
LaTeX. Just irritating cause of stupid errors.
WTF! Are you mental? There is no substitute for making professional looking documents, especially if they contain equations. A bit of a learning curve to start with but not that bad.
WTF! Are you mental? There is no substitute for making professional looking documents, especially if they contain equations. A bit of a learning curve to start with but not that bad.
I agree completely, but it's still super irritating when you are learning to use it. And one little typo somewhere and the whole thing refuses to run...
And you save a little bit of time on putting in equations, but then seem to waste your life fixing the margins or putting in new paragraphs or something stupid. If you're pro with it, it must be awesome, but if you're not, it's frustrating.
Lotus Notes was/is OK in comparison to SAP, but must admit the ribbon interface in Office 2010 is starting to get annoying.
Its called "SAM" and it cost "Animal Health" 200 mill! Yes that is our money ... taxpayers money. It is utterly dreadful for the user. Slows processes by 20 fold. Only any good for managers to run reports. Very depressing.
OSX by far. Almost threw across the room the last Apple PC I used.
Norton
Whenever I'm forced to use a new version of almost any software I spend the first couple of hours trying to make it look and behave as much like the old version as I can. If possible I disable or remove the new features or whatever the new USP is.
I've got almost everything looking pretty much like it did under NT4.
I'm not proud of myself.
Did we find our what the OP's CMS was yet??
oh - and my most hated software? Has to be MS SharePoint, by a country mile. Vile.
Rachel
Most virus checkers get my vote. My previous company had Sophos and that was awful, worse than having a virus. We now have McAfee, which may be even worse. The one on my work computer regularly slows it to a crawl for minutes at a time taking up vast amounts of memory. Right now it's taking up over 400 megs, my first computer only had 64k, what can it possibly be doing with all that memory?!
I want to know what everyone dislikes about itunes?
I shuffle through my music I click on it and it plays, I drag it to my phone if I want it there, and make playlists. what doesn't it do?
I want to know what everyone dislikes about itunes?
+1
Any of the Microsoft office packages. Can't understand the trouble with iTunes though - it's a doddle, surely there's nothing to get frustrated with?
autodesk inventor
SAP is fine if implemented well. The problem is most places can't get around how integrated it is and therefore complicated it is to spec, design and implement.
So SAP then...
Oh and Citrix over a pre 3G mobile data connection
ArcGIS - you need a huge memory to remember where everything is
Word - for anything longer than 8000 words
I'm wondering what people are trying to do with iTunes which frustrates them so much. Add music, play music.
Not sure about hateful but Propellerheads Reason is pretty damn hard to use!
I've never understood the hate some people have for iTunes - it just play music, how hard can it be?
Rachel
ArcGIS 10, and I use it 8 hours a day!
iTunes - I had one revision that wouldn't recognise my ipods!!!
I've had to restore the ipods and reload all my music more times than I can remember due to iTunes not wanting to play.
Try using apple help pages when you have an issue. The not recognising ipods issue advice is to reload your operating system even though the PC recognised I'd plugged the in ipod and every other USB device you could care to think of.
+1 for Inventor - when it works it's fantastic, but when it doesn't like something - oh boy!!
Also, Advitium.
Most virus checkers get my vote.
To be fair,
Most AV products default to the most aggressive settings possible because for years they've solely been judged by stupid league tables in magazines. "Norton's crap, it only catches 98% of viruses..." It's like the camera megapixel thing.
Most AV solutions, when set up properly, aren't nearly as bad as they are out of the box. Sadly, most AV solutions aren't set up correctly.
erm, MS Analysis Services is pretty evil - uber complicated, uber sensitive, minimal error messages
worst in my experience is Map Info - older GIS program, utterly mystifying - takes hours to do the most simple things (would help if I'd done the training i guess)
All the votes for itunes, office, windows etc must be from lucky folk who don't have to use "specialist" software - they're all really good in comparison!
worst in my experience is Map Info
MapInfo is very good, but its learning curve is near vertical.
All the votes for itunes, office, windows etc must be from lucky folk who don't have to use "specialist" software
+1. I've used far too many grim systems over the years that've clearly been developed without any discussion at all with the people who are actually going to use it. Largely proprietary stuff that no-one will have heard of (and hugely expensive).
I want to know what everyone dislikes about itunes?
Innit though? I've bin using it for ten years now and never ever had a problem with it. Used it on Macs and PCs, done wireless music streaming and sharing, synced devices, burned CDs and that, etc etc.
Maybe it's cos they don't know how to use computers. Not everyone does, you need to be quite clever.
Anything BT decides to install on their engineers' laptops.
Well it's nice to know that BT makes its employees lives as miserable as those of its customers...
BT's website is very high up my list of godawful software whose source-code should be printed out, put in a leadlined coffin with a stake through the middle, buried, and then nuked from orbit. My heart sinks everytime I get the company phone bill (online for your "convenience").
Sage used to be pretty dreadful but they've cleaned their act up quite well recently. Word is a bit crap but I can forgive Microsoft quite a lot because Excel is actually really good - so long as you use it as it was intended to be used.
Incidentally I suspect that this is the problem most people have with iTunes. If you just use it for playing music and syncing your iPod, it's fine. But Apple seem to want you to use it to do everything under the sun, and as soon as you plug an iPhone into it there's a 50/50 chance that you'll accidentally open a portal to hell or something similarly inconvenient. To be honest, I reckon it's going to be a good twenty or thirty years before computers are powerful enough to be able to deal with talking to mobile phones without inadvertently tearing an interdimensional rift half the time. I mean, they've still not really got the hang of printers, have they?
Maybe it's cos they don't know how to use computers. Not everyone does, you need to be quite clever.
I'll remind you of that next time you start a "windoze" thread.
Yes Notes is damn awkward to use and we'd all prefer the simplicity of Outlook, but it works and has most features, just everything is hard to find! We use Notes at work, but have some far, far more annoying software to struggle with.
From a person who deploys most of our applications in Citrix, some Autodesk products, HP Quality Centre, Oracle clients/middleware (every release has been awkward), IBM PComm as a problem management solution - Infoman (works very well, but is errr slightly ancient and extremely un userfriendly!), CCPulse (whatever happened to the days where restrictive hardware meant more efficiency).
Probably loads more, and I dont actually use any of those myself, just Notes.
Itunes just sucks.
I've got music players free with petrol that are are easier to use than itunes; drag and drop, back and forth, no stupid DRM.
Hey Apple, I can manage my music ok thanks..
Itunes may well have changed recently, I wouldn't know because I would rather eat my own earwax than use it again.
A friend spent a week putting CDs on a computer to add to his iPod, then deleted the music, cos it was on his iPod, right? THen connected and synced and lost it all.
Suckier than a Professor of Suction at Suckingville University.
Most of the software I write!
ditto
Crikey, nailed it in one...Aldo maybe I iz jus' not az cleva az sum 'ere init 🙄
agresso finance. it might be good if you run a finance system. i don't i want to buy stuff.
MS Word. Went from a company that used WordPerfect, which actually let you format a document how YOU wanted it, to Word which seems to format how some Yank nerd working for Microsoft wants it. Doesn't even let you select the letters you want! Hideous and got worse with each new version.
Those who hate iTunes obviously never had to use Sonic Stage. Now that was shit. iTunes would be fine if it actually kept the bloody album artwork instead of "forgetting" it. Grr.
drag and drop, back and forth, no stupid DRM.
Funny, that's exactly how I've always used my iTunes. Never had a problem in ten years.
A friend spent a week putting CDs on a computer to add to his iPod, then deleted the music, cos it was on his iPod, right? THen connected and synced and lost it all.
Oh of course; it's the [i]computer's[/i] fault. Right. Ok. Yeah....